The future of Razor and LXDE-Qt

It has been an incredible experience and I cannot express how friendly and fun the KDE community is. Everyone has been extremely welcoming and a lot of people absolutely love what the lightweight DEs are doing.

While I was there, we were offered a spot under the KDE umbrella as a KDE member (which is different from becoming a KDE project, it does not add any dependencies on any kde library or project). Further details on that are in a separate email posted recently to the mailing list, I encourage everyone to have a look at it.

I truly hope more people will join me at Akademy 2014; I'm really looking forward to it and will be staying for the entire week. Several photo albums are available on the Akademy wiki, here to convince everyone to come!

I had the chance to talk a lot about Razor there. It has been clear the project has been in need of restructuring for a while now. We've had long periods with no commits at all. The 0.6.0 release has fallen behind and development overall has slowed down greatly. Some people are calling Razor "complete" but, while I agree it can be sufficient for a lot of use cases, it still is in need of a lot of polishing and improvements.

One of the root causes is the lack of actual manpower. We lost several of our core committers due to personal reasons. Everyone here is a volunteer and that comes with the uncertainty on whether we'll still have developers around the next day.

On the other hand, the LXDE team has made tremendous progress in their Qt port. This is excellent news for LXDE, for the Qt community and especially for us because the LXDE project has always shared our philosophy. We both strive for small footprint, limited dependencies and modularity.

So what happens now?

Our two teams have met up and discussed the issues and we have decided that the best course of action for both projects is to focus on a single desktop environment, instead of two.

There have been talks of "merging" ever since LXDE-Qt was announced. Having taken the decision to collaborate, we've all had the pleasure of working together already.

Our plan is to cherry-pick the best parts of Razor and LXDE and include or port those to LXDE-Qt. Other components will be ported straight from GTK code or rewritten from scratch. In the end, we want to offer the best possible experience while reusing as much code as possible. It will not be an easy process and as always, we welcome anyone who wishes to help, be it with development, translations, or general feedback.

In the LXDE codebase, PCMan is overseeing the development of LXDE-Qt which will see a 0.1 release with several razor components already available. The GTK2 port will still be maintained by Andrej and will remain available for as long as possible. The plan is to keep the two branches in sync; as long as GTK2 is still widely in use, the GTK branch will be fully supported and receive further improvements and bugfixes.

Whether LXDE itself will become a KDE member is yet to be determined. Their infrastructure is very attractive and we all wish to make use of it, but in the middle of all these events we have decided to keep the decision for later and involve as much of the community as possible in it.

As for Razor-qt, we will release a final 0.6.0 package for those who are happy with the desktop as it is. We are starting the release process now and it will include several additional improvements from the Razor/LXDE fusion. After the release, there are no further plans to maintain the Razor-qt tree on its own. We will all be working on the LXDE-Qt repositories and we are looking forward to everyone joining forces and working on LXDE-Qt.

I am joined by everyone in hoping this move will bring our two communities closer, as we are all very excited to work together on a single high quality, lightweight Qt desktop environment.

Right now the Razor-qt translation is done in transifex but for Lxde is done in pootle. We´ve had some discussions on lxde maillist about wich infrastructure should be used and there is one certain. It will not happen in transifex.

I think since you share the same goals having both limited manpower it's the best to join the effort. I think it's the best for all wishing for a more polished light desktop environment in Qt.

I used Razor some time, and for me it personally still needs some polishing here and there, especially tool-whise. Joining force on this I believe is a good step for the future, and the LXDE and Razor team makes a good and very competent team of developers.

I've been using razor-qt for several months now, and, while it needs work, I did and do like it, and was gratified to see it in the Ubuntu 13.04 Universe repo. I am extremely gratified to see the devs working with the LXDE crew; something very good is bound to come out of your work!

One of the root causes is the lack of actual manpower. We lost several of our core committers due to personal reasons. Everyone here is a volunteer and that comes with the uncertainty on whether we'll still have developers around the next day.

i'm very very busy now for study qt at all and contribute, please sorry and of course my englihs its not secret how badly are.. right?

On the other hand, the LXDE team has made tremendous progress in their Qt port.

....

So what happens now?

Our two teams have met up and discussed the issues and we have decided that the best course of action for both projects is to focus on a single desktop environment, instead of two.

This always I mention and predicted, as imminent future, and puclicite in venenux site

As for Razor-qt, we will release a final 0.6.0 package for those who are happy with the desktop as it is. We are starting the release process now and it will include several additional improvements from the Razor/LXDE fusion.

apart of notes on packagin made at beginning of this , u mention :

We discussed this briefly and Razor is fine with Pootle, AFAIK - we have
no special attachment to transifex. However in the end it's down to the
actual translators of course

now then, what its the process now, for translations, i'm on charge of Spanish Venezuela...

After the release, there are no further plans to maintain the Razor-qt tree on its own. We will all be working on the LXDE-Qt repositories and we are looking forward to everyone joining forces and working on LXDE-Qt.

One of the root causes is the lack of actual manpower. We lost several of our core committers due to personal reasons. Everyone here is a volunteer and that comes with the uncertainty on whether we'll still have developers around the next day.

i'm very very busy now for study qt at all and contribute, please sorry and of course my englihs its not secret how badly are.. right?

On the other hand, the LXDE team has made tremendous progress in their Qt port.

....

So what happens now?

Our two teams have met up and discussed the issues and we have decided that the best course of action for both projects is to focus on a single desktop environment, instead of two.

This always I mention and predicted, as imminent future, and puclicite in venenux site

As for Razor-qt, we will release a final 0.6.0 package for those who are happy with the desktop as it is. We are starting the release process now and it will include several additional improvements from the Razor/LXDE fusion.

apart of notes on packagin made at beginning of this , u mention :

We discussed this briefly and Razor is fine with Pootle, AFAIK - we have
no special attachment to transifex. However in the end it's down to the
actual translators of course

now then, what its the process now, for translations, i'm on charge of Spanish Venezuela...

It'll be on Pootle; LXDE has its own server.

Martin (brother at bsnet dot se) is in charge of i18n coordination for LXDE, you should direct any question you have wrt translations to him.

After the release, there are no further plans to maintain the Razor-qt tree on its own. We will all be working on the LXDE-Qt repositories and we are looking forward to everyone joining forces and working on LXDE-Qt.

I am joined by everyone in hoping this move will bring our two communities closer, as we are all very excited to work together on a single high quality, lightweight Qt desktop environment.

We've had long periods with no commits at all. The 0.6.0 release has fallen behind and

there's
new components and others removed, and rules for packagers must be
changed, please see pull request if my proposed are bad or good.

The rules for packaging are still unclear at this point. LXDE ships as several small modules and LXDE-Qt likely will too. However, 0.6.0 will need packaging as razor-qt like before so please hold on before changing anything on that front.

>the domain http://pootle.lxde.org seems to be down.. so i'll waith go up ..
>i suppost to be in a startet fase uh?

It works very fine. You should check your ISP I think.

>and i understant that current translator will fussion with the LXDE
>translators?

I've removed locale es_VE (Venezuela) from libfm some time ago just
because have it untranslated is worse than use well translated Spanish
one instead. Feel free to fill the gap if you think it is required.

I've removed locale es_VE (Venezuela) from libfm some time ago just
because have it untranslated is worse than use well translated Spanish
one instead. Feel free to fill the gap if you think it is required.

i note, and i think its better so.. works for gtk, but in qt4 get some problems in some env.. i waith to releases to propose a spanish ve team...